Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.

With the next CPU due next Tuesday, October the 17th i read with interest Atul's post titled "Apply Oracle July CPU patch" all about how to apply the July 2006 CPU on his own systems. The post is a good overview of the process but for me its important for two reasons. First people are talking now about applying the last CPU when the next CPU is now due, Atul is not the only one who has mentioned applying the July CPU to me recently. It's clear that from my experience a lot of people do not apply the CPU's promptly. There are many reasons why this is the case, I guess the most common reason is the lack of time, the complexity of installations, the problems of re-testing but all I think coming back to time in some way. Second Atul's post really highlights the fact that there are a huge amount of different configurations of Oracle products and product sets and all need to have the patches applied to one or more tiers and often on different OS platforms. Just reading Atul's post made me think again about how complex fixing and patching Oracle often is.

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